Asset pipeline is dead. FrontEnd world has much better tools to handle their needs. Here's some solutions to get rid of it and move into modern Rich Client development era.
5. Rails Asset Pipeline
• Added in Rails 3.1 (2011)
• Based on Sprockets (Assets joiner for Rack)
6. Benefits
• Introduce some FE good practices in BE world
• Deliver a single Javascript file per page
• CSS + JS minifying and image sprites
• Promote compilers (less, coffee, sass…)
• Very simple
34. CommonJS
• Each file is a module
• A module need to explicitly declare what’s
visible to other modules with “exports”
• Others modules can access “exports” by using
“require”
66. What else?
• Minifying (with easy control)
• Bundles grow super big
• Optimisation and introspection tools
• Easy split code tools
• Semi-automatic common chunks
• Bunch of loaders for (almost) any type of file
67. Recap
• Rails
• Good for prototyping
• Good to discover FE good practices
• Doesn’t fit for large javascript applications
• Looked production-ready in 2011 because server-
side rendering technology is very limited
• Front end world
• Solves its own problems :)
68. I didn’t talk about
• Bower (enhanced dependencies management)
• React (last FE revolution from Facebook)
• ES2015 (coffeescript replacement)
• Babel (ES2015 + Jsx compiler)